20 years since Armstrong's seventh Tour win, so has cycling changed?

The National

2 days ago

It was hard to argue.
20 years ago this month, Lance Armstrong won his seventh consecutive Tour de France.
The American's victory was his final Tour win in a career that was defined by the greatest cycling race on the planet.
Armstrong was hailed as a phenomenon; all other riders made the three weeks of the Tour seem like purgatory whereas with Armstrong, the harder the race became, the more he embraced, and even relished, the pain. He appeared to be floating serenely up climbs when other riders could barely turn the pedals any longer.
Following that remarkable seventh victory, Armstrong, who is a cancer-survivor which only serve to make his achievement all the more remarkable, delivered a speech that was just as memorable as his racing.
The American had long been the subject of much innuendo and, at times, outright accusations about potential doping which was something he consistently and ferociously denied.
And so, standing in the yellow jersey on the podium on the Champs Elysées, Armstrong delivered a breath-taking monologue:
'I'll say to the people who don't believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics. I'm sorry for you. I'm sorry that you can't dream big. I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles. But this is one hell of a race. This is a great sporting event and you should stand around and believe it. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I'll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets - this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it. Vive Le Tour.'
Lance Armstrong won his seventh Tour de France in 2005 (Image: Robert Laberge/ Getty Images) If Armstrong's words had been genuine, this 20-year anniversary would have merited a considerable celebration.
Except we all know what has happened in the past two decades.
Armstrong retired in the immediate aftermath of that seventh Tour victory but returned to cycling in 2009. It is, he now admits, his biggest regret.
His comeback triggered a sequence of events that would ultimately lead to the now infamous Oprah Winfrey interview, during which he admitted to having doped for the entirety of his career.
The result of his admission was for all his seven Tour victories to be stripped from him, he was forced to pay out millions of dollars in legal fees and settlements and his reputation was trashed, with the American branded a 'disgrace' by everyone and anyone.
Armstrong's legacy, and cycling in the post-Armstrong era, remains complicated.
The American has far from disappeared into the shadows, as many had expected post-doping confession.
He hosts a successful podcast, runs a bike shop in his native Austin, Texas and was involved in an enthralling documentary about his life and career (and which was far more truthful than his autobiography, which was written pre-Oprah).
While there are many who still despise Armstrong for his cheating, there are others, and I include myself in this group, who feel less vehemently about the American these days, realising he was more a symptom of a much wider doping problem than the problem itself. It just so happened he cheated bigger and better than his peers. Cycling, don't forget, was absolutely overrun with dopers in the 1990s and 2000s, with Armstrong just one of literally dozens, if not hundreds of elite riders who were systematically doping.
(Image: Getty Images) Twenty years on, though, where is cycling now?
In a fairytale world, Armstrong's confessions, and the confessions of many of his peers who also admitted to doping around that time, would have acted as a trigger to clean-up cycling meaning we could believe everything we now see from riders.
This wish is, there can be little doubt, far too pollyanna to be accurate.
So two decades on from the final victory by the biggest doping cheat in the sport's history, how clean in cycling? And how much of this year's Tour de France, which began yesterday, can we believe?
Cycling is, I'm confident in saying, cleaner than it was 20 years ago. No longer are there scandals on the scale of the Festina Affair, which revealed systematic doping by the Festina team and nearly brought the Tour to its knees.
But just because nothing quite as dramatic as the Festina Affair has happened in recent years, no one should be fooled into thinking this means cycling has eradicated doping entirely.
Since Armstrong's historic seventh victory, doping has still never been far from anyone's thoughts when it comes to cycling.
Occasional riders have been caught for taking banned substances, but the numbers testing positive remain low.
There have been specific incidents which have raised significant questions about doping within cycling, most notably the Team Sky 'jiffy bag' scandal, as well as questions being raised over the British team's use of TUEs.
During Team Sky's dominance of the sport between 2010 and 2018, there was considerable scepticism, none of it proven it must be pointed out, that Team Sky weren't doing things 'by-the-book'.
Outwith the criticism directed at Team Sky, there remains a general unease amongst many observers about what we're seeing.
This is as a direct result of the times, power outputs and stats the modern-day top riders are producing.
How, if these riders are clean, are they riding faster than Armstrong et al which was, we were told, cycling's darkest era and one which would never be replicated?
It's a reasonable question, and one which no one within the sport seems to be able to satisfactorily answer.
Some of the gains are reasonably explained by the improvements in sports science, nutrition, training, aerodynamics and equipment.
But it's hard to attribute all the improvements and broken records to these advancements, which are marginal gains and nothing more.
Perhaps the sport is just moving on. Just as happens in every sport, the next generation is, invariably, better than the last.
No rider gets into the sport believing they will end up shoving a needle into their arm. But, I'm afraid, the riders in Armstrong's era didn't start off thinking they'd end up that way either.
I don't believe doping is systematic within cycling these days in the way is was when Armstrong was winning - over the next three weeks at the 2025 Tour, I'll be holding onto the belief that most of the riders are clean athletes who got onto the start line because of talent, hard work and nothing else.
Unfortunately, though, the crazy-fast times and seemingly super-human climbing abilities make it hard to believe entirely in what we'll be watching over the next three weeks.
Cycling is, I am certain, cleaner now than in Armstrong's era. It's also, I'd bet, cleaner than a lot of other sports. But entirely clean? Probably not.